It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the prog metal genre is currently undergoing a radical shift with more extreme metal bands embracing their inner prog, and bands with an undeniable prog element playing bigger shows than ever. Members of Jinjer, Blood Incantation and Rivers Of Nihil explain what’s going on.

Words: Dom Lawson

Prog metal pioneers Queensrÿche in 1984. Right: Jinjer, its triumphant next generation.

PAUL NATKIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

“I personally want to play on proggier bills and I generally consider that, by now, Jinjer has become one of the biggest prog metal bands without even being a part of the prog metal scene!”

Eugene Abdukhanov (Jinjer)

Progressive metal is evolving at a rate of knots. Four decades on from the pioneering efforts of Savatage, Queensrÿche and Fates Warning, the ostensible divide between progressive rock and heavy metal has been obliterated like never before, resulting in some of the most mind-bending and deliriously imaginative heavy music ever committed to tape.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Not so long ago, the phrase ‘prog metal’ was generally agreed to apply to a very specific sound. Dream Theater’s rise to glory and subsequent dominance of the scene in the early 90s led to a deluge of like-minded bands, all gleefully demonstrating their technical prowess on records that were structurally adventurous but audibly in debt to classic metal and melodic rock tradition. There have been plenty of exceptions to that rule, not least the synapse-twisting likes of Watchtower and Voivod, but the perception that prog metal was a necessarily flashy and polished extension of trad metal prevailed for many years. These days, however, prog metal is much, much weirder and more diverse than even its stoutest defenders could have predicted.

Jinjer

Portrait: Clément Thiery

The old breed: Fates Warning.

AQUILINA/DALLE/AVALON

Leading the charge for this new generation of prog metal mavericks are Denver, Colorado’s Blood Incantation. Formed in 2011 as an unusually imaginative death metal band, they’ve steadily become one of the most celebrated heavy bands on the planet, and their prog credentials are impeccable. Following on from the release of third album Timewave Zero, which ditched the death metal in favour of long-form psychedelic ambience, Blood Incantation scaled new heights on last year’s Absolute Elsewhere: a two-song, psychedelic voyage that assimilated everything from Floydian prog and meandering cosmic rock to fiendishly inventive old-school death metal, into a kaleidoscopic, genre-blind tour-deforce. Universally acclaimed, Absolute Elsewhere was particularly notable for being a progressive rock record that just so happens to feature extreme metal elements, rather than the other way around. As the band’s drummer Isaac Faulk explains, Blood Incantation were inspired by prog from the start, and Absolute Elsewhere is an album they were destined to make.